Month: May 2006

Google Downplay Microsoft Battle – aparently

Adventures in Teenbed-Ageroom: More mysteriesBetaNews is reporting some statements from Microsoft about their ‘battle with Microsoft.

Others downplayed Google’s battle with Microsoft. While saying the Redmond giant has a history of “not playing fair,” Google co-founder Sergey Brin said his company was just too busy with its own products and services to watch what Microsoft was doing. Fellow co-founder Larry Page added that they wanted to focus on innovation instead.

I’ve never seen the primary battle as one between Microsoft and Google. The primary battle is the one to stay ahead of the rest of the pack. While these two companies have dominant positions the IT arena has still got so much change to go through that any dominance that they have today will only continue if they carry on running ahead of the pack. There is still a lot of disruptive technology out there and and load still to be discovered.

There is still plenty of time for them to both become fossils.

Windows Live LifeCam

Careful GrandadOh, and while we are on the subject of gadgets. LiveSide is reporting on the new Microsoft Live LifeCam’s. Coming out of the Microsoft Peripherals division these are Web Cams with reasonably high definition and reasonably high prices .

What a name though Windows Live LifeCam ,  why Windows Live why not just LiveCam, what has a camera got to do with Life. But naming is another subject altogether. If you are interested in the subject you might find this interesting, but not much .

LCD Glasses

Adventures in Teenbed-Ageroom: The Mount called Marshall

I have always thought it would be cool to move away from the big screen experience and move the experience up close – into my glasses.

The Kowon LCD DMB Glasses look like fun. Oh, and they will pick up a digital TV signal, so you can watch whatever rubbish it is that they are chucking out. And that for me is the problem, I don’t ever see myself wanting to be so immersed in a television program that I don’t want to see what else is going on around me. Television is way too boring to grab all of my attention.

But are they really cool? What do you think. Of course not, they just make you look like a geek, or an alien, or someone who just wants to hide from the rest of the world.

Do I ever see myself buying some? No, but they do look like fun, and it’s a lot more interesting to report than the last break-through in really big LCD screens that no-one can afford.

Count Your Blessings #65 – Being Put in My Place

Jesu Loves You

Today I sat at a computer, answered a few questions about driving and safety. This was all so that my employer could assess my driving risk. Common drivers (of which I used to be be one, but aren’t really anymore) are some of the most endangered people on the planet according to the web site.

At the end of it I fully expected to be told that my driving was OK.

My opinion of my own driving risk was not to be though.

“Overall Rating: At High Risk”

Oh great, that’s me told.

It does me good to be put in your place every now and then. When it comes to driving it’s good to be reminded of the risk that you place yourself and others in every time you sit behind that wheel.

Being put in your place works both ways though:

But you are the ones chosen by God, chosen for the high calling of priestly work, chosen to be a holy people, God’s instruments to do his work and speak out for him, to tell others of the night-and-day difference he made for you–from nothing to something, from rejected to accepted.

1 Peter 2:9–10

IBM Residency: Migrating from Microsoft Exchange2000/2003 to Lotus Notes and Domino 7, LO-D605-R01

Welcome to the Woodland Grandad, not welcome to the signpost!

IBM are advertising a residency to create a Red Book for Exchange to Domino and Notes.

This intrigues me at a number of levels.

IBM complain regularly and bitterly about all of the ammunition that Microsoft throw their way on Notes/Domino to Outlook/Exchange migration and yet they are only now seeking to update a Red Book that deals with Exchange 5.5 migrations. Migrations from Exchange 5.5 might be their best target, but it leaves all of those users who are already on Exchange 2000/2003 with no assistance. Has this really been a wise investment of their efforts.

Also, though, why a residency. Surely IBM should already know how the migration should happen, haven’t they already done it? Now don’t get me wrong here, I applaud them for listening to expertise outside IBM. My concern is that they haven’t already got a proven approach to this problem that they could just spit out. Or perhaps I’m missing the monumental change in Notes/Domino 7 that made such a radical change to this problem when compared to Notes/Domino 6.5.

Are the gloves really off?

When I speak to IBM they tell me they have a reasonable stream of users making the switch away from Exchange, but all I get are customers switching the other way, or at least considering it.

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Count Your Blessings #64 – Stories, Fables and Parables

Harewood House Signs

For thousands of years ordinary people communicated almost exclusively by word-of-mouth. There wasn’t really any alternative because most people didn’t read or write. The richest forms of communicating are the story, the fable and the parable. And the best stories are those that are communicated by word-of-mouth. They have been passed from generation to generation. We seem to be hard wired to take in the meaning of a story in a way that simple instructions just don’t convey.

One of the most visited pages of this site is the story about the mayonnaise jar. I’m sure that most of you, if you have already read the story, will be able to tell me the end of the story after just a few short lines at the beginning to remind you of the story. You’ve perhaps ever remembered the story in a busy time, a time when you were focusing on the urgent rather than the important.

I’ve recently been reading the Coyote Workplace Fables by Adrian Savage. They are really well written stories that have a great ability to communicate a message. The one on Coyote Teaches Time Management has a real resonance with the Mayonnaise Jar Story.

Jesus was, of course, the Master story teller. The Parables are so rich in meaning and still connect today even though most of them were related to an agricultural existence that most of us no longer know. Jesus obviously knew that these words would last. Take the parable of the Wise and Foolish Builders:

“Anyone who listens to my teaching and obeys me is wise, like a person who builds a house on solid rock. Though the rain comes in torrents and the floodwater rise and the winds beat against that house, it won’t collapse, because it is built on rock. But anyone who hears my teaching and ignores it is foolish, like a person who builds a house on sand. When the rains and floods come and the winds beat against that house, it will fall with a mighty crash.”

Matthew 20

How’s that for simplicity, but what a profound message.

And then there are the truly profound ‘lost’ parables; the lost coin, the lost sheep and the lost son.

The Story of the Lost Sheep

By this time a lot of men and women of doubtful reputation were hanging around Jesus, listening intently. The Pharisees and religion scholars were not pleased, not at all pleased. They growled, “He takes in sinners and eats meals with them, treating them like old friends.” Their grumbling triggered this story.

“Suppose one of you had a hundred sheep and lost one. Wouldn’t you leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness and go after the lost one until you found it? When found, you can be sure you would put it across your shoulders, rejoicing, and when you got home call in your friends and neighbours, saying, ‘Celebrate with me! I’ve found my lost sheep!’ Count on it–there’s more joy in heaven over one sinner’s rescued life than over ninety-nine good people in no need of rescue.”

The Story of the Lost Coin

“Or imagine a woman who has ten coins and loses one. Won’t she light a lamp and scour the house, looking in every nook and cranny until she finds it? And when she finds it you can be sure she’ll call her friends and neighbours: “Celebrate with me! I found my lost coin!’ Count on it–that’s the kind of party God’s angels throw every time one lost soul turns to God.”

The Story of the Lost Son

Then he said, “There was once a man who had two sons. The younger said to his father, ‘Father, I want right now what’s coming to me.’

“So the father divided the property between them. It wasn’t long before the younger son packed his bags and left for a distant country. There, undisciplined and dissipated, he wasted everything he had. After he had gone through all his money, there was a bad famine all through that country and he began to hurt. He signed on with a citizen there who assigned him to his fields to slop the pigs. He was so hungry he would have eaten the corncobs in the pig slop, but no one would give him any.

“That brought him to his senses. He said, “All those farmhands working for my father sit down to three meals a day, and here I am starving to death. I’m going back to my father. I’ll say to him, ‘Father, I’ve sinned against God, I’ve sinned before you; I don’t deserve to be called your son. Take me on as a hired hand.’ He got right up and went home to his father.

“When he was still a long way off, his father saw him. His heart pounding, he ran out, embraced him, and kissed him. The son started his speech: ‘Father, I’ve sinned against God, I’ve sinned before you; I don’t deserve to be called your son ever again.’

“But the father wasn’t listening. He was calling to the servants, “Quick. Bring a clean set of clothes and dress him. Put the family ring on his finger and sandals on his feet. Then get a grain-fed heifer and roast it. We’re going to feast! We’re going to have a wonderful time! My son is here–given up for dead and now alive! Given up for lost and now found!’ And they began to have a wonderful time.

“All this time his older son was out in the field. When the day’s work was done he came in. As he approached the house, he heard the music and dancing. Calling over one of the houseboys, he asked what was going on. He told him, ‘Your brother came home. Your father has ordered a feast–barbecued beef!-because he has him home safe and sound.’ The older brother stalked off in an angry sulk and refused to join in. His father came out and tried to talk to him, but he wouldn’t listen. The son said, ‘Look how many years I’ve stayed here serving you, never giving you one moment of grief, but have you ever thrown a party for me and my friends? Then this son of yours who has thrown away your money on whores shows up and you go all out with a feast!’

“His father said, ‘Son, you don’t understand. You’re with me all the time, and everything that is mine is yours– but this is a wonderful time, and we had to celebrate. This brother of yours was dead, and he’s alive! He was lost, and he’s found!’”

Luke 15

These stories have a superb timeless quality to them, but if you do understand the historic context they are even richer. In the parable of the lost coin the coin probably wasn’t intended to be just an ordinary copper that she used to buy stuff at Asda. The listeners would have thought of the dowry coins that she would have been given, precious things. In the story of the lost son the son ends up feeding pigs; that sounds like a job I wouldn’t want to do but for a Jew that must have been lower than low. Again, in the parable of the lost son when the father saw the son “His heart pounding, he ran out, embraced him, and kissed him. ran out, embraced him, and kissed him.” He ran? That was a disgraceful thing for a man of honour to do only servants ran.

 

I like to think of these stories as road signs that guide our way as we progress along life. They inhabit our consciousness and remind us of truth at the correct time.

 

Some people have challenged me construct some stories around Jimmy and Grandad – what do you think? I’ve never really written stories, it might be fun to try.

The Coyote Within: Life's Greatest Treasure

Adventures in Teenbed-Ageroom: Grandad meets one of the natives

Sometimes thoughts last for days because they are prompted by something new each day. My ramblings yesterday about questions have been stoked by a story from The Coyote Within and by comments from Richard Schwartz.

To update someone else’s catch-phrase – ‘It’s the questions, stupid’.

Monitoring and Troubleshooting Microsoft.com

Jimmy gets stranded

I have been catching up on some reading, today’s reading was: Monitoring and Troubleshooting Microsoft.com a really interesting article on how Microsoft have constructed their organisation and technology to tackle the operation of one of the world’s busiest Internet sites.

A few things struck me.

They obviously have the same monitoring problems as the rest of us:

“Left to their default configurations, most monitoring systems generate an excessive number of alerts that become like spam to administrators. Especially with large systems, it is important for organizations to carefully define what should be monitored and what events or combination of events should be raised to the attention of operations personnel. An organization must also plan to learn from the data collected. As with alert planning, this aspect of the solution is a significant undertaking. It requires creating data retention and aggregation policies, and combining and correlating all of the data into a data warehouse from which administrators can generate both predefined and impromptu reports.”

But have got to a point where:

“The overall system processes over 60,000 alerts a day, conducts approximately 11.5 million availability tests a day, parses 1.7 terabytes of IIS log data a day, and collects 185 million performance counters a day at a sampling rate of 45 seconds. However, to reach this degree of monitoring sophistication was a long process and required significant effort and cross-organizational coordination.”

I’m not sure whether those numbers indicate ‘monitoring sophistication’ or not.

The other thing was the ability of Microsoft to leverage internal resources and to operate a continuous improvement methodology that genuinely improved things. These things are incredibly difficult in large organisations.

“After implementing and stabilizing the asset management and reactive monitoring systems, the focus of the operations team shifted to proactive testing of applications and defining proactive monitoring events.”

and

“The testing process also helps to determine what events are meaningful, and what corrective actions are appropriate in the case of those events. All of the information learned from transactional and stress testing is thoroughly documented as part of the release management process of the Microsoft Solutions Framework (MSF) that many of the development teams use.”

and

“The operations team wants to create a common eventing and logging class, based on recommendations from the Microsoft Patterns and Practices group, with deep application tracing.”

It’s very easy to implement something and then to leave it alone because it’s working, that is until it stops working. When it stops working that’s when the problems start because people expect thing to be as they left them when they implemented them and they never are. Changes occur, the best thing you can do is make sure the changes contribute to improvement rather than to service entropy.

Slow Leadership

Careful Jimmy

The other day I was questioning whether we had reached a point of international writers block. Today, out of the blue and via an unexpected link I came across Slow Leadership.

Slow Leadership opposes the pressure for homogeneity in leadership, especially the urge to equate leadership purely with getting short-term results. That’s the equivalent of defining diet as fast food—an endless supply of burgers, fries and sodas—just because that type of meal is quick, simple and cheap. Leadership is far more than producing results in short order. Leadership is the art of finding the right way forward, not just for today but for as far ahead as you can reasonably see. It’s not an activity that can be reduced to simplistic rules-of-thumb and numbered lists of “to-dos.” There’s no Leadership 101 to cover all normal situations; no Leadership-by-Numbers kit you can buy via the Internet.

Yes please – I’ll take some Slow Leadership.

I love having a new thought stream, something that gets me thinking.

Switching Email Products – Switching Advice

Adventures in Teenbed-Ageroom: Jimmy and Grandad decide to go on and adventure

One of the questions I am asked regularly (too regularly) regards the relative merits of email products, mainly Notes/Domino and Outlook/Exchange.

Most often: “We are considering a move from Notes/Domino to Outlook/Exchange can you tell us what the possible benefits would be?”

Less often (almost never): “We are considering a move away from Outlook/Exchange to Notes/Domino can you tell us what the possible benefits would be?”

I normally follow this by another set of questions along the lines of:

“Well what do actually use Notes/Domino for?”

“Well what do you use Outlook/Exchange for?”

“Do you use and Notes/Domino applications?”

“What applications do you have integrated into Outlook/Exchange?”

The result of these questions is nearly always that this particular customer is primarily an email users with some exploitation of calendaring and task type operations. Notes/Domino customer regularly have applications in the form of Notes/Domino databases but they aren’t clear what the business value of them is. Outlook/Exchange users also have other applications which integrate into their email infrastructure but aren’t clear on their value.

My advice to them and to anyone else who asks: There is no compelling business reason to switch for email functions.

It’s actually the wrong question for most customers. The right question for most customers is this “I am wanting to move beyond email being the only way my people collaborate how can I facilitate that”. That question would result in a completely different answer and may result in a change of email infrastructure.

In a world where we are increasingly information rich and question poor I am spending more and more of my time telling people what the correct question is rather than telling them information. Are we seeing a change in the role of the advisor and the consultant. People can find the answer to any question quite quickly, what they can’t do is find someone to tell them what the right question is.

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Count Your Blessings #63 – Piles of Shoes

ShoesThere are regularly piles of shoes to be found at the Chastney household; large ones, small ones, boots, shoes, flip-flops, sandals, pink, black, clean, dirty, polished, trainers, wellington, jellies, red, green, brown, laced, velcro, unlaced, plastic, cloth, leather. Each of these shoes have brought with them someone who wants to come into our house.

Sometimes the shoes bring people in need, sometimes they bring people who want to have fun, sometimes they even bring members of the family.

We don’t have rules about the types of shoes which are allowed to come and we don’t have rules about the people they bring.

A pile of shoes is a sure sign that the shoes want to come for whatever reason. It’s a blessing to be privileged with so many of them visiting.

Never give up. Eagerly follow the Holy Spirit and serve the Lord. Let your hope make you glad. Be patient in time of trouble and never stop praying. Take care of God’s needy people and welcome strangers into your home.

Romans 12

 

Document reviewing again

Adventures in Teenbed-Ageroom: Grandad gets stuck in the fearsome strangling wiretrapI’m reviewing documents again today – there has to be a better way to communicate something.